I'm a big proponent of first-principles cooking. If you understand what's going on at the bottom, you almost never need to pay attention to a recipe's "method" section and can do way more with "what do I have on hand...?" as an entry point to cooking.
Discussion
It's kind of funny because before I learned the science of what's going behind all these methods that I used, I just did this shit without thinking about it.
Like I knew about "salting from within" before I read that book, but when I read that and a couple other of cooking science books, I was like, oh shit, it makes so much more sense now.